While older versions of the AMI and its packages will continue to be available for launch in Amazon EC2 even as new Amazon Linux AMI versions are released, we encourage users to migrate to the latest version of the AMI and to keep their systems updated. In some cases, customers seeking support for an older version of the Amazon Linux AMI through AWS Support may be asked to move to newer versions as part of the support process.

To upgrade to Amazon Linux AMI 2014.09 from 2011.09 or later, run sudo yum update. When the upgrade is complete, reboot your instance.

Remember that the Amazon Linux AMI repository structure is configured to deliver a continuous flow of updates that allow you to roll from one version of the Amazon Linux AMI to the next. Please consult our lock-on-launch FAQ for a discussion of how you can lock an instance (either a new launch or already running) to a particular version of the Amazon Linux AMI repositories.

Having spent the past release tracking the 3.10 kernel series, for this release we have moved the kernel to version 3.14.19, which is the most recent long-term stable release kernel.

Additionally, instances running the HVM AMIs will now restart 30 seconds after a kernel panic, instead of hanging indefinitely.

Customers who depend on the previous HVM AMI behavior to remove faulty hosts from their fleet can adjust the kernel.panic setting by creating a new file -- /etc/sysctl.d/99-override.conf with kernel.panic=0 as the contents.